Prizes | Peter Carey, writer, Booker Award winning novelist 1979 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) War Crimes 1980 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award War Crimes 1981 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) Bliss 1982 National Book Council Award (Australia) Bliss 1982 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award Bliss 1985 Australian Film Institute (Best Adapted Screenplay)Bliss 1985 Australian Film Institute (Best Film) Bliss 1985 Book Council Award (Australia) Illywhacker 1985 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Illywhacker 1985 The Age Book of the Year Award Illywhacker 1986 Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction Novel Illywhacker 1986 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction Illywhacker 1986 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (Australia)Illywhacker 1986 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (shortlist)Illywhacker 1988 Book Council Award (Australia) Oscar and Lucinda 1988 Booker Prize for Fiction Oscar and Lucinda 1989

 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) Oscar and Lucinda 1994 The Age Book of the Year Award The Unusual Life of Tristran Smith 1997 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist) Jack Maggs 1997 The Age Book of the Year Award Jack Maggs 1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) Jack Maggs 1998 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) Jack Maggs 2001 Booker Prize for Fiction True History of the Kelly Gang 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) True History of the Kelly Gang 2001 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) (shortlist) True History of the Kelly Gang 2001 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction True History of the Kelly Gang 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Theft: A Love Story Man Booker prize: Peter Carey criticises decision to include US writers | Books | The Guardian Man Booker prize: Peter Carey criticises decision to include US writers Australian novelist, who has won prestigious prize twice, says award’s ‘particular cultural flavour’ will be lost Peter

 Carey speaks to Luke Harding Monday 13 October 2014 13.34 EDT Last modified on Friday 11 November 2016 08.55 EST Share on Messenger Close The Australian writer Peter Carey, twice winner of the Booker prize , has criticised the decision to open up the award to Americans for the first time, claiming that the old Commonwealth-only version had a “particular cultural flavour” that would now be lost.

The winner of the 2014 Man Booker prize will be unveiled on Tuesday evening in a glittering ceremony in Guildhall, London. Two American authors have made the shortlist: Karen Joy Fowler for We are All Completely Beside Ourselves and Joshua Ferris with To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. In an interview with the Guardian, Carey said he was unenthused by the move to expand Britain’s richest literary prize across the Atlantic. Asked if this was a mistake by the organisers, Carey replied: “Let me answer this in a slightly perverse sort of a way. I find it unimaginable that the Pulitzer or the National Book award people in the United States would ever open their prizes to Brits and Australians. They wouldn’t.” He stressed: “There was and there is a real Commonwealth culture. It’s different. America doesn’t really feel to be a part of that.” He added: “The old Booker had a particular cultural flavour. The Pulitzer and the National Book awards have their sorts of flavours. I suppose I’m not generally in love with the notion of global marketing.” Carey’s remarks carry considerable literary weight.

He is one of only three novelists to have won the Booker twice, with Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001; he has been shortlisted on two further occasions. (The other double-Bookers are Hilary Mantel and JM Coetzee). Carey’s nuanced scepticism follows similar top-end grumblings from former winners AS Byatt and Graham Swift, as well as from critics who fear that the decision may see American fiction steamroller delicate new talent from smaller English-speaking nations. Pinterest Peter Carey, pictured in London. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian No personal grudges exist among those currently in contention. As well as the Americans, there are three Brits and an Australian. The bookies’ favourite is The Lives of Others by the Indian-born Londoner Neel Mukherjee. Also on the shortlist are Howard Jacobson with J, Ali Smith for How to be Both, and the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan , whose The Narrow Road to the Deep North is strongly tipped. Over the weekend all of the Booker-shortlisted authors appeared at a literary festival in Cheltenham, afterwards chatting companionably in a circle.

The conversation ranged through how a Booker nomination multiplies sales (massively); what to do on Tuesday evening if you don’t win (grin a lot); and how the winner needs to brace for a publicity nightmare (the losers go home graciously). The mood was convivial. The six agreed that any of their books would be a worthy winner. Others who dropped into the marquee-like green room included Rowan Williams and Martin Amis. Afterwards the authors sat round the same table at a dinner hosted by Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Carey was speaking before the publication next month of his new novel, Amnesia, which is loosely inspired by the story of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden. The novel, Carey’s 13th, may eventually feature on the 2015 Man Booker shortlist. He said that his misgivings about the revamped Booker were not categorical. “The prize is clearly an ongoing organic thing and we’ll see what happens,” he said on a recent visit to London. Carey admitted he had not read any of the shortlisted works, other than The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which he hailed as deeply impressive. “Richard Flanagan clearly has to win. He’s our man.

He’s a serious guy who can really, really write. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Richard,” he said of his fellow Australian. Flanagan’s novel tells the story of a Australian prisoner-of-war who survives the building of the Burma railway. His luminous narrative deals with the second world war and its aftermath, and with themes of guilt, survival and sorrow. In a Guardian webchat Flanagan revealed that his father – who worked on the infamous “death railway” – died the day he finished the manuscript. Pinterest Carey: ‘There was and there is a real Commonwealth culture. It’s different. America doesn’t really feel to be a part of that.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian According to Carey, The Narrow Road to the Deep North marks a long-awaited cultural moment. He said that leftwing Australian writers of his generation – he is 71 – were strongly involved in the anti-Vietnam movement and consequently struggled to write fiction about the war and its protagonists, even though they had grown up listening to its myths and stories. “It’s really extraordinary the degree to which Australian writers of my generation completely ignored all of those Australian soldiers who fought and died.

The reason we didn’t want to deal with it was because during the sixties the Returned Services League was generally a very reactionary force and we were the anti-Vietnam movement,” Carey said. “They were against people with long hair and rock ’n’ roll. Their really justifiable fear and hatred of the Japanese read to us like racism. As a result the literary writers didn’t really want to imagine what those people went through when they died. That’s why [Flanagan’s novel] is really, really important.” For 45 years the Man Booker prize was only open to authors from the UK and the Commonwealth, plus the republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe. Last year, justifying the decision to expand it, Jonathan Taylor, chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “We are embracing the freedom of English in its versatility, in its vigour, in its vitality and in its glory, wherever it may be. We are abandoning the constraints of geography and national boundaries.” The £50,000 prize can now go to any author writing in English for a work published in the UK.

Carey has been recognised by US judges, with Parrot and Oliver in America, which features an imaginary Alexis de Tocqueville, shortlisted for the National Book award in 2010. But this is only because Carey has dual Australian and American citizenship – he has lived in New York since the early 1990s. Carey said he was disappointed with Barack Obama – for whom he voted in 2008 – and sometimes despaired about the state of American democracy. He also took a swipe at the rightwing government of Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, who has adopted a hardline policy towards boat people and refugees. Asked whether he voted in Australia, Carey said: “I tried to. I couldn’t. I haven’t had an address in Australia for a long time.” But he said he wouldn’t have voted for Abbott. In joking tones, he said: “Is is true they call him [Abbott] shifty? No, I wouldn’t have voted for shifty.” Carey also described claims by former prime minister John Howard that asylum seekers had thrown their children into the sea as a “lie of Goebbeleseque proportions”.

He was critical, meanwhile, of the current Australian government’s proposal to bring in a draconian law against whistleblowing. “It’s horrendous”, he said. Topics Richard Flanagan says fellow Booker winner Peter Carey is rightly concerned about dangers of change ‘for smaller cultures’ Published: 15 Oct 2014 Australian novelist picks up award for story of prisoners and captors on Burma railway in The Narrow Road to the Deep North Published: 15 Oct 2014 Man Booker prize winner says he is saddened by the Australian government’s environmental policies and prime minister Tony Abbott’s statement that ‘coal is good for humanity’ Published: 14 Oct 2014 The Narrow Road to the Deep North is truly impressive and allays fears that Commonwealth voices would be edged out Published: 14 Oct 2014 Booktopia - Oscar And Lucinda, Winner of the 1988 Man Booker Prize by Peter Carey, 9781741661057. Buy this book online. Click on the Google Preview image above to read some pages of this book!

Booktopia Comments Have your say - CLICK HERE Product Description ‘Luminous and magical, OSCAR AND LUCINDA dances with a shimmer of light and dark as its two noble gamblers play out dreams of God and glass. A spectacular achievement.’ Helen Daniel Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia's youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story. Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia. Peter Carey's visionary brilliance, and his capacity to delight and surprise, propel this story to its stunning conclusion. ‘Luminous and magical, OSCAR AND LUCINDA dances with a shimmer of light and dark as its two noble gamblers play out dreams of God and glass. A spectacular achievement.’ Helen Daniel ‘OSCAR AND LUCINDA are two of the most perfectly realised characters in modern fiction.

An immensely skilful and absorbing juxtaposition of a gently comic, obliquely ironic, and deeply compassionate vision of human existence.’ David Williamson ‘The most audacious and rewarding of all Carey's novels.’ Geoffrey Dutton ‘Peter Carey is a complete writer. He has all the skills, and knows all the tricks. He can combine a genius for stark, under-stated comedy, with a nearly Dickensian generosity of description; the result is that hardly a character passes through this novel without Carey enlightening us to the peculiarities of physiognomy, psychology and personal history that establish that character's unique and lasting patent over a portion of the reader's memory.’ Aravind Adiga, Second Circle Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943. He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 — after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived. In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University.

He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen. For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney. After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History — a short story collection — was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success. From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector. In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week.

Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize. In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, and His Illegal Self. He is at work on a new novel.

Prizes: 1979 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) War Crimes 1980 New South Wales Premier's Literary Award War Crimes 1981 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) Bliss 1982 National Book Council Award (Australia) Bliss 1982 New South Wales Premier's Literary Award Bliss 1985 Australian Film Institute (Best Adapted Screenplay) Bliss 1985 Australian Film Institute (Best Film) Bliss 1985 Book Council Award (Australia) Illywhacker 1985 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Illywhacker 1985 The Age Book of the Year Award Illywhacker 1986 Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction Novel Illywhacker 1986 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction Illywhacker 1986 Victorian Premier's Literary Award (Australia) Illywhacker 1986 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (shortlist) Illywhacker 1988 Book Council Award (Australia) Oscar and Lucinda 1988 Booker Prize for Fiction Oscar and Lucinda 1989 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) Oscar and Lucinda

 1994 The Age Book of the Year Award The Unusual Life of Tristran Smith 1997 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist) Jack Maggs 1997 The Age Book of the Year Award Jack Maggs 1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) Jack Maggs 1998 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) Jack Maggs 2001 Booker Prize for Fiction True History of the Kelly Gang 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) True History of the Kelly Gang 2001 Miles Franklin Award (Australia) (shortlist) True History of the Kelly Gang 2001 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction True History of the Kelly Gang 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Theft: A Love Story Click here to read a Paris Review interview with Peter Carey.

Peter Carey could be three-time Booker winner - Telegraph Book news Peter Carey could be three-time Booker winner The Man Booker Prize could have its first three-time winner later this year after the Australian novelist Peter Carey was named as a contender for the £50,000 prize. Peter Carey won the Booker Prize in 1988 and 2001 Photo: REX By Stephen Adams , Arts Correspondent 7:43PM BST 27 Jul 2010 Follow His book Parrot and Olivier in America, a fictional retelling of the life of the philosopher Alexis de Tocquville, is one of 13 chosen for the "long list" of Britain's most highly regarded literary award. Carey, 67, has won twice before, for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001 – a record only matched by JM Coetzee, the South African, and JG Farrell, the late Anglo-Irish author. The only previous winner of the prize on this year's list, Carey was last night installed as the 3/1 favourite by Ladbrokes, although the field is the most open in years.

Another heavyweight is Rose Tremain, who won the Orange Prize two years ago for The Road Home. Her latest novel, Trespass, which tells of the ructions caused by a British antiques dealer when he tries to buy a small pocket of seemingly idyllic rural France, has been described as a "darkly enthralling novel". Related Articles Author's Slap at European writers 16 Aug 2010 Andrew Levy, a former winner of the Whitbread Prize and the Orange Prize, is also a contender for The Long Song, which depicts the last years of slavery in Jamaica. But the list is mainly devoid of such big names as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Sir Salman Rushdie. Ion Trewin, literary director of the Man Booker Prize, was unapologetic. He said: "People's names and reputations are irrelevant. It's not for an author, it's for a book." It was "obvious" why Amis's much-publicised novel The Pregnant Widow, about a group of young men and women coming to terms with the sexual revolution in the early 1970s, was not included, he suggested.

"You've only got to look at the reviews to see why he isn't there," he said sharply. Amis has only been shortlisted once for the Booker Prize, for Time's Arrow in 1991. Earlier this summer, speaking at the Hay Festival, Amis criticised literary prizes for only picking "boring" books as winners. But Trewin retaliated: "He would say that because he hasn't won any prizes himself. Some of his early fiction is brilliant. For myself, I don't follow him in the way that I did." Whether the absence of McEwan's Solar, a satirical take on climate change science, was an error was "a matter of opinion", he added. Rather, this year's list includes some relative newcomers, including Tom McCarthy, who laboured for seven years before finding a publisher. He has been lauded as a great new author by many in the publishing world. Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, described his first novel Remainder as "one of the great English novels of the past 10 years". However, his latest work, C, about a First World War pilot who becomes involved in a variety of odd missions, has divided critics.

One said the unconventional novel left him "close to tears of boredom". Sir Andrew Motion, chair of the judging panel, said the long list was comprised of "13 exceptional novels – books we have chosen for their intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors". He said he was "delighted" about the fact that Ladbrokes and William Hill had completely different ideas about who were most likely to win. The latter picked The Long Road by Andrea Levy. "I think it says something nice about the range," he said. Carey's place in literary history is in no way assured at this stage, as the Man Booker has a reputation for confounding the bookmakers. Booker Prize Awarded For 'Oscar and Lucinda' - NYTimes.com Booker Prize Awarded For 'Oscar and Lucinda' Reuters Published: October 27, 1988 LONDON, Oct. 26— Peter Carey won the Booker Prize, Britain's top literary award, on Tuesday for ''Oscar and Lucinda,'' a love story set in 19th-century England and Australia about a puritanical priest and a young heiress drawn together by their gambling addictions. Mr.

Carey, who lives in Sydney, Australia, received the $26,250 award in person from Michael Foot, former leader of the Labor Party and chairman of the award judges, at a televised dinner at the Guildhall in London. Mr. Foot, a writer and historian, said all the judges agreed the six books this year were exceptional. They included ''The Satanic Verses'' by Salman Rushdie, which was banned in India and Pakistan after Moslem complaints that it was offensive to Islam; ''The Beginning of Spring'' by Penelope Fitzgerald; ''The Lost Father'' by Marina Warner; ''Nice Work'' by David Lodge, and ''Utz'' by Bruce Chatwin. 1988 Booker Prize 1988 Booker Prize Winner: Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey Shortlist Cover illustration by Gregory Rogers using an illustration by Pierre Le Tan Dustjacket Synopsis: "Peter Carey's eargerly awaited new novel imagines Australia's youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story. "Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling.

A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia. "Peter Carey's visionary brilliance, and his capacity to delight and surprise, propel this story to its stunning conclusion." Quotes: "Luminous and magical, Oscar and Lucinda dances with a shimmer of light and dark as its two noble gamblers play out dreams of God and glass. A spectacular achievement." - Helen Daniel "Oscar and Lucinda are two of the most perfectly realised characters in modern fiction. An immensely skilful and absorbing juxtaposition of a gently comic, obliquely ironic, and deeply compassionate vision of human existence." - David Williamson "The most audacious and rewarding of all Carey's novels." - Geoffrey Dutton "Peter Carey is a complete writer. He has all the skills, and knows all the tricks.

He can combine a genius for stark, under-stated comedy, with a nearly Dickensian generosity of description; the result is that hardly a character passes through this novel without Carey enlightening us to the peculiarities of physiognomy, psychology and personal history that establish that character's unique and lasting patent over a portion of the reader's memory." - Aravind Adiga, Second Circle First Paragraph: If there was a bishop, my mother would have him to tea. She would sit him, not where you would imagine, not at the head of the big oval table, but in the middle of the long side, where, with his back to the view of the Bellinger River, he might gaze at the wall which held the sacred glass dageurreotype of my great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins (1841-66). These bishops were, for the most part, bishops of Grafton. Once there was a bishop of Wollongong, travelling through. There was also a canon, and various other visiting or relieving reverends. Sometimes they were short-sighted or inattentive and had to have the dageurreotype handed to them across the table.

My mother crooked her finger as she picked up her tea-cup. She would not tell the bishops that my great-grandfather's dog-collar was an act of rebellion. They would look at a Victorian clergyman. They would see the ramrod back, the tight lips, the pinched nose, the long stretched neck and never once, you can bet, guess, that this was caused by Oscar Hopkins holding his breath, trying to stay still for two minutes when normally - what a fidgeter - he could not manage a tenth of a second without scratching his ankle or crossing his leg. From the UQP hardback edition, 1988. You can read further details of this and other novels by Peter Carey on this webpage . Cover illustration by Ian Beck Quotes: "For my money, Bruce Chatwin is the greatest stylist writing in England today...Not a word is wasted in the telling of this tale.

Each sentence is fashioned, polished, and put into place with microscopic care" - Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telgraph "This shiny little novel is not just about pretty porcelain figurines, but about dirty great issues of life and death" - Philip Howard, The Times "Bruce Chatwin knows his objets d'art, and the writing has the warmth of a double fascination - of the collector's fascination with portable art, and with the author's fascination with collectors as a species" - John Harvey, The Sunday Telegraph "With Chatwin, the real excitement derives from an intellectual drama, in dialogues about art as a surrogate creation, a robbery of divine power, and art collecting as idolatory...For Chatwin, ideas are the supreme fictions" - Peter Conrad, Observer "A highly sophisticated, highly civilized jeu d'esprit" - New York Times Book Review First Paragraph: An hour before dawn on March 7th 1974, Kaspar Joachim Utz died of a second and long-expected stroke, in his apartment at No. 5 Siroka Street, overlooking the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

Three days later, at 7.45 a.m., his friend Dr Vaclav Orlik was standing outside the Church of St Sigismund, awaiting the arrival of the hearse and clutching seven of the ten pink carnations he had hoped to afford at the florist's. He noted with approval the first signs of spring. In a garden across the street, jackdaws with twigs in their beaks were wheeling above the lindens, and now and then a minor avalanche would slide from the pantiled roof of a tenement. From the Picador paperback edition, 1988. Cover photograph by Walter Bibikow Dustjacket synopsis: "It is March 1913, and dear, slovenly Mother Moscow, her windows still sealed against the cold of winter, is stirring herself to meet the beginning of spring. Change is in the air - uncertainty, too - and nowhere more than at 22 Lipka Street, the home of the English printer Frank Reid. Frank returns home from work one night to find that his wife has gone away; no one knows where or why, or whether she'll ever come back.

All Frank knows for sure is that he is now alone and must find someone to care for his three young children. "Into Frank's life comes Lisa Ivanova, a quiet, calming beauty from the country, untroubled to the poit of seeming simple. Bus is she? And why as Frank's bookkeeper, Selwyn Crane, gone to such lengths to bring these two together? Who is the passionate Volodya, who breaks into the press at night - a thief, an agitator, a would-be murderer? Frank sees, but only dimly, for he is a rational man in Moscow, a city where human experience - of love and friendship, of politics and power - is always at its most unfathomable." Quotes: "A marvellous book...bristling with wry comedy." - Dan Cryer, Newsday "Fitzgerald...has mastered a city, a landscape, and a vanished time.

She has written something remarkable, part novel, part evocation, and done so in a prose that never puts a foot wrong...The Beginning of Spring is her best novel to date." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator First Paragraph: In 1913 the journey from Moscow to Charing Cross, changing at Warsaw, cost fourteen pounds, six shillings and threepence and took two and a half days. In the March of 1913 Frank Reid's wife started out on this journey from 22 Lipka Street in the Khamovniki district, taking the three childrenwith hr - that is Dolly, Ben and Annushka. Annishka (or Annie) was two and three-quaters and likely to be an even greater nuisance than the others. However Dunyasha, the nurse who looked after the children at 22 Lipka Street, did not go with them. Dunyasha must have been in the know, but Frank Reid was not. The first he heard about it, when he came back from the Press to his house, was from a letter. This letter, he was told by the servant Toma, had been brought by a messenger.

From the Mariner Books paperback edition, 1998. The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie The cover shows a detail from "Rustam Killing the White Demon" from a Clive Album in the Victoria and Albert Museum Dustkacket Synopsis: "Just before dawn one winter's morning a hijacked jumbo-jet blows apart high above the English Channel. Through the debris of limbs, drinks trolleys, memories, blankets and oxygen masks, two figures fall towards the sea without the benefit of parachutes: Gibreel Farishta, India's legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices, self-made self and Anglophile supreme. Clinging to each other, singing rival songs, they plunge downward, and are finally washed up, alive, on the snow-covered sands of an English beach. A miracle; but an ambiguous one, because it soon becomes apparent that curious changes are coming over them. Gibreel seems to have acquired a halo, while, to Saladin's dismay, his legs grow hairier, his feet turn into hoofs, and there are bumps burgeoning at his temples. "So begins The Satanic Verses, Salman Rishdie's first novel for five years.

"Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen (by whom?) as protagonists in the etrenal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But which is which? Can demons be angelic? Can angels be devils in disguise? As the two men tumble through their tale, through time as well as space, towards their final confrontation, we are witnesses to a cycle of extraordinary stories, tales of love and passion, of betrayal and faith: the story of Ayesha, the butterfly-shrouded visionary who leads an Indian village on an impossible pilgrimage; of Allie, the mountain-climber haunted by a ghost who urges her to attempt the ultimate feat - a solo ascent of Everest; of murders, metamorphoses and riots in a London 'visible but unseen'; and centrally, the story of Mahound, the recipient of a revelation in which satanic verses mingle with divine.

"In this great wheel of a book, where the past and the future chase each other furiously, Salman Rushdie takes us on an epic journey, a journey of tears and laughter, of wonderful stories and astonishing flights of the imagination, a journey towards the evil and the good that lie inseparably entwined within the hearts of women and men." First Paragraph: 'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again...' Just before dawn on winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.

'I tell you you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, 'To the devil with your tunes,' the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, 'in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now.' From the Viking hardback edition, 1988. Cover illustration by Gideon Hart Quotes: "An idiosyncratic and haunting novel: lush, slow-paced, sensual, metaphorical and, at the same time, anxiously worrying over the demands of kinship and the trail of history...this is a cultural historian's novel and the scholarly curiosity that went into Marina Warner's fine books on female myths and iconography makes here for a devotedly careful recreation" - Hermione Lee, Observer "Marina Warner's fiction has a slow, dreamy quality that is at once pleasurable and slightly sinister...this is a moving book, and a very bookish one" - Lorna sage, Times Literary Supplement "Warner's language and pace astonsih and reward.

Her characters, male and demale, elderly and children, strike again and again the unexpected true note, whether playing, grieving, lusting, skinning fowl for dinner or complaining abut politics" - Marianne Wiggins, The Sunday Times "The Lost Father has all the pleasures of a literary crossword puzzle, combined with a brilliantly realised women's world of snail hunting and water carrying, of the terrors of the passegiata and of old maidhood. It is Warner's best novel so far..." - Lorraine Fletcher, The Guardian "A subtle, lyrical novel...shows a compeling imagination at odds with a sceptical and troubled intelligence" - Patrick Parrinder, London Review of Books "Marina Warner has written an ambitious novel of rare imaginative power...it has the ring of absolute authenticity - the heat and dust of a primitive Italian community hedged in by centuries of custom and sorrow.

By the time I finished The Lost Father I had been made quite Mediterranean, sand-bagged by the sensual" - Ian Thomson, The Independent "A rich and magisterial novel" - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times First Paragraph: LONDON, 1985 '"Like the needle her mother would burnish in a candle flame before probing under her skin, memories of those days pierced her with a sudden clarity; a sister's footfall on the scoured stairs, the nursey smell of clothes boiling in the copper cauldron on the stove, the angle of another sister's head, intent on the pattern she was cutting on the table. For long stretches she preferred to live in deliberate forgetfulness. "But sometimes, she couldn't stop the memories coming. In the same way as she'd sometimes want an ice cream even though she knew her teeth would feel skinned alive, she'd lift the blinds and look into the sunlight of those days, and then, above all, she'd see her father, and he was shaving." I paused. Your head remained cocked so that you could see through your bifocals the button you were sewing. 'What do you think so far?' I asked.

I tapped the pages of the manuscipt together on my lap. From the Picador hardback edition, 1989. Notes: Peter Carey – Better Reading Contact Peter Carey Peter Carey is the multi-award-winning author of thirteen novels, plus two highly acclaimed collections of short stories and a memoir, Wrong About Japan. His books have won or been short-listed for every major literary award in Australia. He has won the Booker Prize twice – in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang and in 1988 for Oscar And Lucinda . In 1998 he won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Jack Maggs , and again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. He has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times (for Bliss , Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs) Born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Peter Carey now lives in New York.

'Kelly Gang' author Peter Carey wins second Booker Prize - SFGate 'Kelly Gang' author Peter Carey wins second Booker Prize Oscar Villalon Published 4:00 am, Thursday, October 18, 2001 Australian author Peter Carey became the second person to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction twice when he received the 2001 award in London last night for his novel "True History of the Kelly Gang ." Carey won the Booker in 1988 for his novel "Oscar and Lucinda." The other author to have won the Booker twice is South African writer J.M. Coetzee . "True History of the Kelly Gang" is Carey's fictional account of the short life of Ned Kelly, the legendary 19th century Australian outlaw. In Carey's retelling, Ned is driven to robberies and theft by the cruelty of Australia's judicial system and its English police, who from the beginning make life unbearable for Kelly's Irish family. Told through a series of letters written by Ned to his unborn daughter, the novel was noted by critics for its striking use of ungrammatical, demotic language, managing to create a rich literary work through the first-person voice of a semi-literate man.

Kenneth Baker , chair of this year's jury, said in a statement on the award's Web site that Carey was chosen because his book "is a magnificent story of the early settler days in Australia, expressed through the unforgettable voice of a vilified man who came to stand for more than he knew." The other books short-listed for the award this year were the novels "Oxygen" by Andrew Miller , "number9dream" by David Mitchell , "The Dark Room " by Rachel Seiffert and "Hotel World" by Ali Smith . Ian McEwan was also among the finalists and had been considered to be Carey's only competition for the award. McEwan was nominated for his novel "Atonement." Like Carey, McEwan had won a Booker, too, in 1998 for his novel "Amsterdam." This is the 33rd year of the Booker Prize for Fiction. The winner receives 21,000 pounds -- about $30,000 -- and all of the short-listed authors, including the winner, receive 1,000 pounds, or about $1,500.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage: Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page. Peter Carey - Literature Literature Biography Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, Australia, in 1943. He studied Science at Monash University, and wrote advertising copy to support himself during the early part of his literary career. Australian identity and historical context play a part in several of his literary works. He began by writing surreal short stories, and published two collections, War Crimes (1979), and The Fat Man in History (1980). These stories, along with three previously uncollected works, are all included in his Collected Stories (1995).

He then wrote 3 novels: Bliss (1981), about an advertising executive who has an out-of-body experience; Illywhacker (1985), a huge vision of Australian history told through the memoirs of a 100-year old confidence man or "illywhacker"; and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), a complex symbolic tale of the arrival of Christianity in Australia. Although not a science fiction writer as such, there are some elements of this in his writing, particularly in Illywhacker, which led to this novel receiving the Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction Novel and being shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, both in 1986. Illywhacker was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1985, and three years later, Oscar and Lucinda won the same prize.

While writing his next novel, The Tax Inspector (1991), Peter Carey moved to New York, and has since written further novels: The Unusual Life of Tristran Smith (1994); Jack Maggs (1997), billed as a re-imagining of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations; True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), told in fictional letters from the Australian outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly to his estranged daughter; and My Life as a Fake (2003), a story centred around a literary hoax which gripped Australia in the 1940s. Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang both won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and with True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey won the Booker Prize for Fiction for the second time, in 2001. Peter Carey wrote the script for the Wim Wenders film, Until the End of the World (1992), and co-wrote with Ray Lawrence, the screenplay for the film adaptation of Bliss (1985).

Oscar and Lucinda was also adapted for film in 1997, with a screenplay witten by Laura Jones. He has also written a children's book, The Big Bazoohley (1995) and a non-fiction book, 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). Wrong about Japan (2005), is a memoir/travelogue of the author's journey through Japan with his son Charley and their attempts to understand the Japanese culture and heritage. Peter Carey still lives in New York, where he teaches Creative Writing at New York University. He has been awarded three honorary degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Australian Academy of Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His later novels are Theft: A Love Story (2006); and His Illegal Self (2008). His novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, was published in 2010 and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific region, Best Book) and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

His latest novel is The Chemistry of Tears (2012), which tells the story of a clock expert who is restoring an automaton while grieving for her lost lover. Peter Carey was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished services to literature, in 2012. Awards Critical perspective During the epic course of Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Peter Carey’s postmodernist ‘Victorian’ novel, a clergyman transports a glass church across the desert as a ‘crazed image’ of his love for Lucinda, who in turn looks out at the ‘silver skin’ of Sydney Harbour: ‘A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life’. The fabulous fiction of Australia’s best-known author internationally contains an abundance of such ‘improbable’ ideas and exotic scenarios, an endless inventiveness of storytelling within books that typically play games with narrative, chronology – and Australian history.

They freely mix historical and fictional characters, the everyday with nightmares, and bring us Australian voices such as Herbert Badgery, the supposed 139-year-old narrator of Illywhacker (1985), and bushranger Ned Kelly whose ‘found journals’ constitute True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). Tall tales, lies and hoaxes are integral to Carey’s work, most exuberantly in Illywhacker but also in his novel, My Life as a Fake (2003), which draws upon a real-life Australian literary hoax of the 1940s, as an invented character comes to life with consequences for his creator both comical and murderous. Carey was part of a generation of Austraslian writers who moved away from realism towards international models; by his own account he was first influenced by William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His work’s hybrid mixing of fable, satire and fantasy can now be seen as akin to post-colonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo and Michael Ondaatje.

What gives it distinction, though, is the distorting mirror it holds up to Australia, telling surreal stories about its development and place in the contemporary world, as in the political fable at the heart of The Unusual Life of Tristran Smith (1994), which takes place in ‘Efica’ and ‘Voorstand’ (Australia and America, and their love-hate cultural relationship). Tristan, the book’s deformed but theatrical narrator, is one of a number of ‘odd bods’ in Carey’s fiction, disguising his grotesque appearance by wearing a mask and a Disneyland-like costume to become ‘the enigmatic figure of Bruder Mouse’. Carey began by writing quirky short stories, such as ‘Conversations with Unicorns’ and ‘Report on the Shadow Industry’, while others have the offbeat sexual scenarios that recur in his work. In ‘Peeling’, for example, a woman is made to strip off, revealing several identities and changes of sex underneath, ending up as ‘a small doll, hairless, eyeless, and white from head to toe’. ‘He Found Her in Late Summer’ is also memorable, as a man finds that the beautiful woman he has rescued is a vampire.

Carey’s first novel, Bliss (1981), is an unnerving black comedy full of farcical episodes, the story of an advertising executive who, after nearly dying, realizes that ‘there were many different worlds, layer upon layer … and that if he might taste bliss he would not be immune to terror’. Harry Joy becomes convinced he is in Hell, surrounded by ‘all the cast of tormentors’. He finally abandons suburban morality himself by taking up with Honey Barbara, a hotel hooker, and he ends up on a Commune, talking to the trees. Bliss set a pattern in its satirical views of capitalism, sex and politics. Its fluid treatment of time is also characteristic: we wait until the final sentences to learn that the story is being told to us by Harry and Honey Barbara’s children. ‘Illywhacker’ is Australian slang for a trickster or conman. It is an apt title for Carey’s most purely enjoyable book, a cornucopia of incidents and characters unfolding over 500 pages, ‘a salesman’s view’ of Australian history related by Herbert Badgery, who advises at the outset: ‘I am a terrible liar … relax and enjoy the show’.

Herbert tells about his life as a pioneer aviator, would-be businessman and drifter, being seduced by his future wife, 15-year-old Phoebe, while repairing her family’s roof. The action moves back and forth in time: Herbert as a child is taught to disappear and how to fight dragons by a Chinese magician, and during the Depression years goes on the road with his family, performing their ‘snake trick’ in hotel bars. During the war, he sets up a pet shop with American backing, supplying a talking cockatoo to General McArthur: a symbolic gesture within a book with a strongly satirical view of Australia. It ends with Herbert being kept as an exhibit, and, in a pointed contemporary note, the ‘best pet shop in the world’ is taken over by a Japanese corporation. Like Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs (1997) is a postmodernist pastiche of the Victorian novel, re-writing Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, specifically the relationship between Pip and the convict Magwitch. It is also a wonderful yarn about trickery and disguise.

Jack Maggs, formerly a convict in New South Wales, has returned at great risk to 1837 London to see adoptive ‘son’ Henry Phipps and becomes entangled with rising young author Titus Oates. Mesmerised by Oates, Maggs tells his own story of criminality and lost love, and through his writer’s habit of collecting ‘characters’ Oates is himself (literally) captured by Maggs, and has to undergo his own love tragedy. True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) brings us another Australian telling his life-story. Or rather, many stories, set down in the idiomatic voice contained in ‘thirteen parcels of stained and dog-eared papers, every one of them in Ned Kelly’s distinctive hand’. He tells of his mother’s struggles to keep the family together, his criminal apprenticeship with bushranger Harry Power, and the truth about the murders at Stringybark Creek.

Along the way we meet some idiosyncratic characters; a transvestite cowboy (‘Steve entered the hut like the Dame in the pantomime’), the love of his life Mary, a cast of corrupt policemen and authorities – and hear Kelly’s pleas to posterity for ‘the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age’. My Life as a Fake (2003) has comic moments, and atrocities; once again the action moves around in time and the narrator may not be trustworthy. Sarah, previously editor of The Modern Review, tells us about events in 1972 when she was in Malaysia with veteran author John Slater, and their meeting with down-at-heel Christopher Chubb, once a young poet who invented the ‘Bob McCorkle’ hoax of the mid-1940s. Chubb’s own horror story takes over: he says that his adopted daughter was snatched by a madman claiming to be Bob McCorkle himself. Sarah plans to obtain Chubb’s own stolen manuscript (entitled My Life as a Fake), and her own secrets start to emerge.

As a typically tricky tale in which readers and characters are never certain who is telling the truth, just who is hoaxing whom, the novel is quintessential Peter Carey. Dr Jules Smith, 2004

Question: With which book did Peter Carey win the 1988 Booker award?
Answer: 'OSCAR AND LUCINDA'